Disloyal: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump – Michael Cohen (Notes)

 

Foreword: The Real Donald Trump

In February 2019, before Cohen was to testify about Donald Trump before Congress, Cohen faced hundreds of death threats from Trump followers after Trump tweeted that Cohen was a rat as well as other angry accusations against him and his family.

Cohen claims that Trump colluded with the Russians, but not in a sophisticated way. He knew that the Mueller investigation was not a witch hunt. He tried to pursue a major real estate deal in Moscow during the 2016 campaign. While Trump told Americans, “I have no dealings with Russia,” Cohen was overseeing his deal for a Trump tower in Moscow and keeping Trump and his kids informed on the progress.

Trump has a million acquaintances, but no true friends. He has spent his whole life avoiding and evading responsibility for his life. He has crushed or cheated all who stood in his way. Cohen played a big role in making that happen for him. He was Trump’s liar, spin doctor, thug, and intimidator.

Trump has always needed fixers and lawyers to break the law and fight dirty on his behalf. Roy Cohn, Cohen and now Giuliani, Barr, Kushner, and Pompeo are willing to distort the truth, break the law, risk jail time, and ruin their careers for Trump.

If Trump loses reelection in 2020, he will not go peacefully because he will have to face accountability for his criminal behavior and face jail time. He projects his sins and crimes onto others because he believes everyone is as corrupt, shameless, and ruthless as he is. He is immersed in a tangle of fraud, scams, and lawlessness, and his minions will do anything to lie, distract, and cover it up. What the public knows is only the tip of the iceberg.

1 – The Apprentice

When Cohen had an opportunity to work for Trump in 2006, he was thrilled. He considered The Art of the Deal a masterpiece. He felt he had the best of Trump’s qualities: deal-driven, relentless, a hard worker, never afraid, and prepared to be brutal and heartless in pursuit of his ambitions. He already had wealth, but he wanted it all: power, the good life, public acclaim, big deals, fast cars, private planes, and the excess and glamour and zest for life that Trump seemed to personify so effortlessly.

2 – The Fixer

Cohen was mesmerized by Trump’s celebrity and power, and like a cult member, would do anything for him, including take a bullet. The sheer tornado that surrounded Trump was addictive. The energy, action, and chaos was intoxicating. Cohen was obsessed with Trump because he made him feel excited and alive. He was fully devoted to Trump, worshipping him, seeing him as his success and salvation. He felt like he belonged to something or someone important. All he had to do was be loyal and obey unquestioningly and Trump would invite him into a different reality of wonder, excitement, power, intrigue, and adulation. Cohen leapt at the chance to be Trump’s personal lawyer and became a willing participant in a fantasy that heightened his senses and sense of self.

3 – The El Caribe

(Nothing consequential)

4 – Laura

(Nothing consequential)

5 – Catch and Twist

When sexual assault cases came against Trump, like in the case of Jill Harth, Cohen was instructed to “catch and kill.” He was to find, stop, kill, bury, or twist and distort beyond recognition any story that could be harmful to Trump’s brand. These women were to be paid off, have favors done for them, or threatened into public statements of denial or silence.

In the 1980s, Trump had a fake spokesperson named John Barron who shared with the tabloids stories of Trump’s sexual prowess and the beautiful women he’d dated. In the 1990s Trump created an alter ego named Johnny Miller who was actually him disguising his voice. He would call tabloids to brag about his wealth and sexual conquests. Keeping his name in the papers was good for the brand. Now Cohen was Trump’s spokesman to the media.

When it came to being on Forbes’ richest people list, Cohen was instructed to inflate Trump’s wealth. When it came to paying taxes, he was instructed to deem his properties worthless and at a loss to avoid paying taxes and to get refunds.

Believing that Trump was a billionare who could afford any deal that came him way, Cohen realized during the 2008 financial crisis that Trump’s career as a real estate developer was over. He had far less money than Cohen imagined. He focused on licensing deals for his brand and endorsed just about anything.

Trump showed no interest in any conversation in which he was not the center of attention, never shared the joy of  anyone else’s success, often bragging that he was more successful instead, and saw life as a zero sum competition in which he always had to win.

When Trump went on an angry tirade against Cohen, he belittled, mocked, shouted, and made fun of the smallest aspect of his appearance or manner. His form of leadership revolved around anger, fury, rage and chaotic blaming and shaming.

He often publicly mocked, insulted, and embarrassed his son Don, Jr. Don was happy as a bartender, being far from his dad, but Donald gave him an ultimatum to come work for him or be cut off entirely—disowned and disinherited. He now does what he hates—real estate, office politics, and enduring the circus of his dad’s life to avoid being exiled.

6 – Trump for President (Part One)

Since 2007, Cohen encouraged Trump to run for president, believing he could cut through political correctness, put America first, fix the infrastructure, stop needless wars in the Middle East, and improve our international trade agreements. Cohen knew Trump was a liar, delusional, and a manipulator, but he was a visionary with a no nonsense attitude and charisma to attract voters. He did very well with working class fans of The Apprentice and WWE wrestling. Cohen also wanted Trump to run and win because he knew it would bring him power too. “I wanted to be able to crush my enemies and rule the world.”

Though Cohen had never heard Trump use the N-word, he recalls Trump talking about a contestant on The Apprentice named Kwame Jackson, saying, “I’d never let that black fag win.” Trump admired Don King, Mike Tyson, and Oprah and was friendly to many African American people, but only rich celebrities he respected and considered in his peer group of the rich and famous.

When Obama was elected, Cohen described Trump’s racism as a reactionary and unhinged “Archie Bunker racism” as he would refer to Obama as Barack Hussein Obama, with a disdainful emphasis on his middle name. Nelson Mandella was also an object of contempt for Trump. “Tell me one country run by a black person that isn’t a shithole,” Trump said, particularly of Africa. “They’re all complete fucking toilets.” He preferred the Apartheid-era white rule of South Africa.

Watching the inauguration of Obama in 2008, Trump was incensed. When Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, he was unhinged. He ranted and raved, mocking every aspect of Obama—the way he talked, walked, and dressed—and couldn’t understand America’s adulation for him. He thought Obama “acting presidential” and giving good speeches was an act, making him a phony, that Obama got into Harvard through affirmative action because he wasn’t smart, believed he was born in Kenya, and that he was a Manchurian candidate—a politician being used as a puppet by an enemy power. At one point, Trump hired an Obama actor to sit a  chair in his office so he could rant at him and fire him. But the truth was he deeply envied Obama’s power and position and wanted it.

Cohen showed Trump a poll in 2011 that said 26% of Republican voters would support him as president, telling him that that was unprecedented for someone who wasn’t a politician and not even running. Trump, excited, asked Cohen to find out how to make it happen. The timing was perfect in his age, wealth, and celebrity and he believed he could run the country better than Obama. If he lost, he said, it would be the greatest infomercial for his brand in the history of politics. It was a win-win.

Trump polled highly with conservatives because of his positions: pro-gun, anti-abortion, low taxes, a trade war with China, and a promise to make America great again. But it was birtherism that put him over the top—the racist and nativist conspiracy that Obama wasn’t Hawaiian, but Kenyan, so was an imposter. Trump didn’t care if the conspiracy was true, he just had an instinct for locking onto divisive messaging—something to exploit to his advantage—to stir strong feelings in those who took his side. Trump knew how to stir up deep prejudices and fears for his benefit, like making the absurd claim that he saw Arabs dancing in the streets in New York as the twin towers fell. He exploited tribal, us-versus-them thinking, speaking to the irrational and emotional impulses of the masses for ratings in the news cycle.

Trump started reading populist publications like Breitbart and World News where he picked up more conspiracies, adding to his arsenal the belief that Obama wasn’t a Christian, but a secret Muslim.

Trump called a reporter and told him he had investigators in Hawaii who had found proof that Obama was born in Kenya and he would be shocked at what they found. The reporter asked for an exclusive when Trump was ready to share the details. Trump said okay, just run the headlines. He made the story up on the spot. There was no team and no investigation. For all of his complaints about fake news, Trump had a long history of calling reporters and inventing things to get him in the headlines. Soon, reporters called from every major news outlet and Trump reveled in the free publicity. “Fuck Obama. If you think he hates me now, just wait.”

As Trump demanded that Obama’s school records be released, he had Cohen insure that his own never be made public, because though Trump was competitive, he didn’t compare with Obama. Cohen called the New York Military Academy where Trump attended and pressured them to send him Trump’s records through strong arm tactics.

People believe that Obama roasting Trump at the White House Correspondents Dinner was the moment Trump hated Obama and decided to run, but Cohen says that not even close to true. Trump hated Obama and decided to run long before that.

In 2012, political operative and conspiracy-monger Roger Stone entered the picture. Trump described him as crazy, devoid of moral purpose, willing to do anything in service to himself or any politician he supported, always and only because it would benefit him personally. For Trump, these are good qualities to have. Years previous, Stone taught Trump to always be on the attack and never back down, just as his old lawyer Roy Cohn told him to never show weakness or apologize—when attacked, attack back harder. “Roger’s a fucking pervert,” Trump said, knowing he was bisexual and that he and his wife were swingers, “but he can help me. He’s the dirty trickster. He’s the best trickster money can buy.”

How did Trump, a man with no personal piety or interest in church or religion in any way gain the interest of evangelicals? Cohen was a neighbor of Paula White, a televangelist who had known Trump for a decade. After seeing her on TV, Trump invited her over to give him private Bible studies in the only version of Christianity that could appeal to him—the prosperity gospel. White is self-interested, consumed with lust for worldly wealth and rewards, and with two divorces, a bankruptcy, and a senate financial investigation on her record, she was the preacher for him. It helped that she was blonde and beautiful. Paula White wanted to set up a meeting between Trump and a number of evangelical leaders—Jerry Falwell, Jr., pastor Darrell Scott, and Creflo Dollar among them—to discuss his potential run for president and the spiritual dimensions of that.

When Trump was a kid, he attended Norman Vincent Peale’s church in New York, a mixture of Christianity and positive thinking to gain wealth and power in life by the banishment of all negative thoughts, emotions, fears, and doubts. He shared this with the group of evangelical leaders in the room and they were impressed. Cohen knew that day he would become president because he has no trouble lying to them about his personal convictions and they had no trouble believing him. He was cunning and knew how to appeal to their desires and fantasies.

They asked to lay hands on Trump and pray for him. Being a germaphobe who didn’t like being touched, still he agreed. They prayed that God would guide him to do his will for America and the gospel. Trump sat with his eyes closed, faking piety, as if moved by God. He asked them if he should run for president. Paula White told him the time wasn’t right. Trump said he agreed. When the meeting had ended and they left the room, Trump said to Cohen of their laying on of hands and prayer, “Can you believe that bullshit? Can you believe people believe that bullshit?”

Chatting with Jerry Falwell Jr. and his wife Becki, Cohen discovered they were staying in New York an extra day so their daughter could see Justin Bieber perform on the Today Show in Rockefeller Plaza the next morning. Cohen used his connections to get them front row tickets, a favor that would pay off in 2016 when Trump ran for president.

Trump didn’t run in 2012 for a number of reasons. His polling numbers dropped to 8% after Obama released his birth certificate but Trump continued to push the birther conspiracy. Americans got tired of that. Plus, he had business concerns to take care of, like trying to strike a deal in Ukraine. Trump promised to run in 2015, and Cohen promised to be by his side.

7 – Stormy Weather (Part One)

A story emerged that porn star Stormy Daniels had sex with Donald Trump in a hotel at a golf charity event in Utah in 2006. Her lawyer contacted Cohen to get a statement of denial from Trump as Daniels would also deny it so they could make the story disappear. Trump said he was there with quarterback Ben Roethliberger, but the ladies ignored him because they wanted “Trump.” (He frequently spoke of himself in third person.) She allegedly had sex with Trump in exchange for getting on The Apprentice, but Trump couldn’t convince the producers to let a porn star on the show. He hoped to kill the story so Melania wouldn’t hear about it. Cohen believed she knew Trump slept with other women because that came with the territory of being married to him, but she didn’t ask and didn’t want to know.

8 – That’s What Friends Are For

Cohen explains that Trump reads the news to find weaknesses in businesses and families and offers to “help” them, but in the end takes everything they have. Cohen details how he helped Trump screw small businesses and contractors in 2011 by inventing frivolous grievances and bullying and threatening them. Cohen and other staffers didn’t mind doing this dirty work for Trump because if they didn’t, they’d face Trump’s rage and be fired immediately. Similarly, those surrounding him in the White House and right wing TV pundits rubber stamp Trump’s lies and delusions so they aren’t ousted from his inner circle. The buck never stops with Trump when something goes wrong, it’s always someone else’s fault. He simply demanded that whatever the problem was, his fixers fix it.

9 – The End of the World

Trump has an eye for sycophants, yes men, and loyal soldiers and used his charisma to draw them into his inner circle. Cohen was one of them. He tells more stories of refusing to pay contractors and ruining their lives. Trump never expressed regret or remorse, but saw screwing others over as winning. Every time Trump praised Cohen for a job well done, Cohen got sadistic glee from doing the wrong thing and hurting people. He knew that lying before Congress to defend Trump was wrong, but he liked it.

Concerning the Miss Universe Pageant, Cohen claims that Trump behaved like an adolescent teen, picking out his favorite “piece of ass” and bragging that he could have sex with any one of them he wanted because he was a celebrity. He bragged about going backstage to watch them change. He came from an era of the Rat Pack of the 1950s where women weren’t respected, but treated as playthings for men. Trump told Cohen that if Melania ever caught him cheating and wanted a divorce, he wouldn’t be upset or hurt. “I can always get another wife. That’s no problem for me. If she wants to go, so be it.” She was just another transactional relationship like everyone else in his life. He was more concerned about how much she would take from him in a divorce.

“Trump’s grandiose sense of self-importance, his need for constant praise, his exploitation of others without guilt or shame was the classic definition of a narcissistic sociopath.” (181) Trump projected his worst traits onto others, believing they were all as bad as he was, asking Cohen how often he cheated on his wife, and didn’t believe him when he said never.

Cohen recounts a time Trump saw a woman on a tennis court and said, “Look at that piece of ass, I’d love some of that,” not knowing she was Cohen’s fifteen-year-old daughter. He complimented her figure, asked her for a kiss, and told her to watch out because in a few years he’d be dating some of her friends.

10 – How to Fix a Poll

In 2014 CNBC ran a poll to determine the twenty-five most influential business people alive today. Trump ranked 187 of 200 and was furious. Cohen had a tech friend who suggested buying 200,000 IP addresses for $15,000 and using them to move him up to #9 by the time the poll concluded, which they succeeded in doing. Trump printed out the results and bragged to all of his friends who fed his ego in return, as if he really believed he’d earned the spot. But there was a disclaimer on the poll saying CNBC had the right to remove any name they wanted for any reason, and Trump’s name was promptly removed. Furious, Trump had Cohen threaten a law suit, but nothing could be done. When the man who bought the IP addresses and ran the scam billed Trump for $15,000, he refused to pay him because he didn’t get the results he wanted.

Jerry Falwell, Jr. called Cohen needing another favor. While vacationing in Miami years previous, his wife Becki sat on a tractor as he took photos of her, and before long she was topless. They’d befriended a “pool boy” and promised to finance a business for him, but when they didn’t, he revealed that he had the photos of Becki topless and would make them public, ruining their reputation as evangelical Christian leaders. Falwell had no idea how he got access to his phone, but he needed Cohen to fix this. Cohen called the pool boy’s lawyer and said this was extortion, and if he didn’t get the photos and the names of everyone else the pool boy sent them to by the end of the day he’d call the FBI. The pool boy dropped the case and promised the photos would never see the light of day, to Becki’s great relief.

11 – Trump for President (Part 2)

Trump decided to fund his own campaign on the cheap, knowing he would get tons of free publicity. Cohen wants readers not to miss this: the media won Trump the election, covering his every move, speech, and interview for free. Right, left, moderate, tabloid, broadsheet, radio, television, internet, and Facebook all gave him free press. Trump was pure chaos all the time, appealing to something primal in us, and like a car accident, we couldn’t look away. When Trump was waning, he played the media by using attack tweets, saying something racist or insulting to make sure there was always something for the media to fixate on.

In June 2015, as Trump announced his candidacy with an incoherent, rambling speech full of bragging, lies, and racism, the Trump team looked at each other in disbelief, asking if Trump really wanted to win. They cringed and couldn’t believe he was saying what he was saying. But after the speech, everyone in his circle praised him, told him the speech was great, and inflated his ego. As usual, no one told him the truth. Disgusted, Cohen’s wife and kids begged him to stop working for Trump.

Ivanka and Don, Jr. were mortified and horrified. They worried that Trump was irreparably destroying his brand, as people stopped doing business with him. They begged Cohen to convince him to drop out of the race before the business was destroyed.

The media condemned Trump that night as a joke, a racist, and a bully, but he tapped into the resentments of some Americans: the undereducated, reactionary white folks and conservative and Christian men and women who were sick of political correctness, illegal immigration, globalization, climate change, gay marriage, abortion, the loss of American jobs overseas, and disregard for God. Trump was their advocate and champion.

When Cohen asked Trump to ease up on the anti-Hispanic rhetoric, Trump reportedly said he didn’t care because he would never get the Hispanic vote anyway. “Like the blacks, they’re too stupid to vote for Trump. They’re not my people.”

Trump pretended not to be racist and anti-immigration when around those who questioned him on these matters just as he pretended to be pious for Paula White and a room full of evangelicals. Cohen knew Trump had what it took to be president because he could be deceitful and disingenuous without shame. Behind closed doors, he told Cohen he stood by his comments about Mexicans because they are true.

During a debate, Fox News personality Megyn Kelly asked Trump about his misogynistic comments about women. After commenting on Rosie O’Donnel and feeling attacked by Kelly, Trump got on the radio the next day and said Kelly had blood coming out of her eyes and out of her “wherever.” Now she was in hiding with her kids as Trump supporters appeared at her house threatening her. Roger Ailes from Fox called Trump and told him he had to come on her show and make this right so they would leave her alone. Trump agreed to come her show only if the questions were softballs and pre-written by Cohen. His supporters would see them together and stand down. Still, Trump had no sympathy for her. “She came after me. If you come after me, I come after you ten times harder.”

12 – Russia (Part One)

People keep wondering why Trump admires Putin as much as he does. The answer is simple. He envies him because he is rich and powerful. Trump was impressed that Putin controlled 25% of Russia’s economy and considers him the richest man in the world by far—worth trillions. He loved the idea of being a lifelong ruler or dictator who can do whatever he wants. He liked that an entire country could be run like a personal business. Cohen believes if Trump loses the 2020 election he will not leave peacefully or voluntarily. He wants to keep his power.

There was no organized or direct collusion between Trump and Putin. Putin disliked Hillary Clinton because of negative comments she made about him. Putin wanted to interfere with our democracy and help Trump win, and this caused Trump no unease. Trump reasoned that we interfere in other people’s elections and overthrow their countries too, so it’s fair game.

When American Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed and dismembered in Turkey, this crime had no impact America’s foreign relation policy with the Saudis. “What the fuck do I care? He shouldn’t have written what he did. He should have shut the fuck up,” Trump said. He liked the idea of traitors and the disloyal being dealt with harshly.

Trump didn’t expect to win the election, so praising Putin meant that his channels would remain open for business dealings when he lost. Like Putin, neither of them cared about their countries, but only their personal wealth and power at the expense of their countries.

Trump cares nothing for the wellbeing of Midwestern white working class folks. He is a con man who pretends to care about guns, abortion, and God for votes because his base is his path to power.

The chapter details trying to get Trump Tower Moscow built. Putin had to approve it, so Trump praised him. He used campaign money to make money for himself to fund that project. When there was little progress on the tower, Cohen suggested pulling the plug.

As Cohen sat in Trump’s office, Don, Jr. came in and said, “The meeting is all set.” Trumps said, “Okay, good, let me know.” A Russian lawyer was offering dirt on Hillary Clinton.

14 – Hurricane Stormy (Part 2)

Cohen details looking for racially diverse people to support Trump so he could transform Trump’s white nationalism into the image of a God-fearing, open-minded, and inclusive leader. Cohen did this by courting black Christians like pastor Darrell Scott. Cohen’s job was to create an upside down Alice in Wonderland world where people doubted their own eyes and ears. Cohen did this simply by saying any insinuation that Trump was a racist, sexist, bigot, xenophobe, Islamaphobe, demagogue, narcissist, anti-Hispanic, and anti-Semitic were lies from the disgusting liberal mainstream media.

By spring of 2016, it was down to Trump and Cruz in the primaries. Cohen decided to create fake news for the National Inquirer. More than a friend and supporter of Trump, David Pecker, head of the paper, was a sycophant, supplicant, and propagandist for Trump. People worry about Russia but ignore the role the National Inquirer played in helping spread disinformation to help Trump win—like printing a photo of Lee Harvey Oswald standing next to a man whose face is hard to make out and alleging that it was Ted Cruz’s father, making him to be a Cuban co-conspirator in the Kennedy assassination.

The Enquirer ran the story on Cruz’s father when the Indiana primaries were coming up and Cruz was surging in the polls. No one picked up on it or repeated it, so Trump got on Fox and Friends and blasted the fake news mainstream media for not reporting on this conspiracy and it worked. The story then went viral and Cruz lost Indiana. Trump believed the National Enquirer—a fake news rag—should win a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting.

If any candidate began rising in the polls, The National Inquirer ran conspiracies against them in the headlines for hundreds of millions of Americans who saw the headlines at grocery checkout counters. The mainstream media would then write disapproving articles about these made up stories, giving them exposure, which gave Trump more free press.

Whenever Trump refused to act presidential and became petty, like comparing Cruz’s wife to Melania, the media would become aghast, but his base loved it. His supporters reveled in how juvenile he was, especially if it upset the left and mainstream media.

They invented stories about Rubio having a love child, a mistress, a cocaine connection, a secret gay past, his wife Jeanette having a lurid past, and their marriage being on the rocks. The message behind this disinformation campaign was if you were an evangelical Christian or family values person, you should run from Rubio and—the irony—vote for Trump.

Cohen noticed that every time Trump held a rally and it was on TV, everyone behind him was white. He told Trump he needed more diversity. Soon a few carefully placed black supporters began appearing behind him on TV. This was not to win black voters, but to ensure his base, like white Christian woman who would hold their nose and vote for him, that he wasn’t racist while openly using racist rhetoric.

Once Trump won the nomination and bragged that he liked winning with women, women with whom he’d had affairs started coming forward, like Playboy model Karen McDougal. Pecker paid $150,000 for the story to squash it. Trump had to pay Pecker and Pecker had to pay McDougal by hiding it so no one would find out. Pecker paid McDougal, but every time he tried to get his money from Trump, he stalled. Trump stiffed him.

Trump personified the phrase typical of narcissists: “accusations are confessions.” If Trump accused you of lying, cheating, or stealing, you can best bet it’s because that’s what he was doing.

Cohen was shocked that Trump was able to get away with so much and the media never looked for it, but instead combed through Hillary’s past and dealings in great detail and made her answer for it. He could only surmise that this was because they believed Hillary would win, so was the more important person to focus on.

Cohen was made aware of the Access Hollywood tape where Trump bragged that he could sexually assault women because he’s a celebrity—the infamous “grab ‘em by the pussy” quote. When that blew over, porn actress Stormy Daniels, who had already been paid to have her story squashed, wanted to sell the story of her affair with Trump. Two weeks before the election, now was the time to capitalize on it, believing that Trump would lose and her story be worthless after the election.

Trump didn’t want to pay it, but considered it a deal compared to what he would have lost in a divorce to Melania. He bragged to Cohen that this fans would think it was cool that he slept with a porn star. He knew Pecker wouldn’t buy her story and squash it because he still hadn’t paid him for the McDougal deal. After clearing it with Trump, it was agreed that $130,000 would be paid to Daniels by Cohen personally.

15 – Election Night

The night Trump won the election, Cohen was given a VIP to the event but didn’t sit with Trump in the suites with the others. He knew something was off, that Trump was distancing himself from him. Expecting  his bonus to be the usual $500,000 with an extra $150,00 for paying Stormy Daniels to keep silent, he will pissed to find that his bonus was only $50,000. The excuse was that the company lost money that year due to the distraction of the election. After complaining, he got $420,000 and the job of being personal attorney of the president. He was reimbursed for Daniels in the form of fake legal fees.

Cohen makes a case that everything in the Steele Dossier is false. An anonymous person called wanting $20 million for the footage of Trump with prostitutes peeing on the bed the Obamas had slept in, but refused to let Cohen see and verify it first. The dossier clamed Cohen went to Prague, but he’d never been to Prague. The FBI investigated and conformed this.

Trump asked Cohen what he thought of the Muslim travel ban. Cohen said he hated it. Trump said it was Bannon and Miller’s idea and they’ll fix it the next time around.

16 – Typhoon Stormy (Part Three)

In January 2018 the Wall Street Journal ran a story saying that Cohen paid Stormy Daniels $130,000 through a company called Essential Consulting. He went on a media tour defending Trump while Daniels went on a media tour promising to share details about Trump’s penis size. Cohen and Trump got on the phone with Melania and tried to lie to her about it, Trump acting shocked that Cohen hushed the story with money from his own pocket, as if he didn’t know. She knew they were lying, so changed the subject. She understood that this came with being married to Trump.

Soon after, the FBI raided Cohen’s home and office. He didn’t know what they were looking for or why they were there. He called Trump. “They’re coming after us,” Trump said. “This is all part of the witch hunt. Stay strong, I have your back. You’re going to be fine.” That’s the last time they ever spoke.

17 – The Conviction Machine

Trump over next few weeks made public statements saying Cohen wasn’t really his lawyer, just a low level PR guy, putting distance between them. Trump, Jared, Ivanka and Cohen entered a joint defense using Cohen’s lawyer. Trump stiffed him on the legal fees. Still, Cohen lied and stayed on message on TV and before Congress: this is a witch hunt and Trump has no dealings with Russia.

Cohen pleaded guilty to five tax evasion charges to protect his wife from going to trial and possibly facing prison time. He was sentenced to three years in jail.

18 – Otisville Federal Satellite Camp

Cohen recounts his time in prison and getting cease and desist letters from Trump’s organization forbidding him to write this book.

“Please remember what I testified to Congress, the second time: There is a serious danger that Donald Trump will not leave office easily, and there is a real chance of not having a peaceful transition. When he jokes about running again in 2024 and gets a crowd to chant ‘Trump 2024,’ he’s not joking. Trump never jokes. You now have all the information you need to decide in November.” (360)

 

 

 

A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership - James Comey (Notes)

 

In the author’s note, Comey states that loyalty is indispensable in his line of work in law enforcement, but this loyalty is to truth itself, not to any party or person, no matter his own personal political leanings. Only the evidence after thorough investigation matters.

Comey tells the story of his life and career path. He was the U.S. deputy attorney general during the administration of George W. Bush, then appointed as the director of the FBI by Barack Obama in 2013, and fired by Donald Trump in 2017.

He paints different pictures of each of these presidents’ personalities, leadership styles, ways of going about business, and the climate surrounding them in the White House. Bush, for instance, could be blunt, impatient, start meetings early, and had a devilish sense of humor. Though his humor had a mean streak, it was essential to relieve tension in meetings. One minute they are talking about terrorism, the next minute the room is erupting in laughter.

Comey addressed the illegal overreach of the NSA and the use of torture in the Bush administration. The Bush administration operated in a culture where uncertainty was intolerable and doubt was derided as weakness. There was pressure to be certain. In politics, admitting doubt and mistakes is career suicide. It was difficult for Comey persuade them, no matter how much evidence was presented, that some of what they were doing was illegal.

When Obama nominated Comey to be director of the FBI in 2013, he met with him in the Oval Office for an informal conversation, telling him this was the last time they could speak this way because the FBI and president needed to be at arm’s length, working independently, and needed to go through professional, established protocols to interact with one another. In other words, they couldn’t be personal friends. This protects both the president and the FBI. Obama stated his confidence in him to do his job well.

Comey describes Obama as intelligent, composed, open-minded, someone who asked questions, looked at things from multiple angles, and took his time deliberating. He was both confident and humble, which is difficult to balance. He also described how Obama and Biden worked together, though having completely different personalities and divergent ideas about which direction to take things.

As Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump competed for the presidency in 2016, Comey had two important issues on his plate to investigate—evidence that Putin had directed Russian operatives to interfere with the election in favor of a Trump victory, mainly through use of misinformation on social media, and whether Hillary Clinton broke any laws sharing classified information over emails sent on an unsecured, unofficial server.

The evidence that Putin interfered with the election was certain, but it was concluded that Clinton had broken no laws, she was just sloppy and careless. Comey was disappointed that Obama, in an interview with 60 Minutes, declared Hillary’s innocence before the investigation was over. This would make the investigation look partisan.

Comey announced to America that the case was closed and Hillary was innocent of criminal behavior. Right wing media, upset that there was no conviction, tried to spin the investigation as partisan and unjust, undermining confidence in the FBI. Comey assured readers that the personal politics of FBI members never get in the way of investigation. They follow strict protocol, work as a team, compare the evidence to the law, then make their conclusions.

Congressman Anthony Weiner was under investigation for sending nude photos to underage girls, and while examining his laptop, the FBI found a file of Hillary’s emails—tens of thousands more than were submitted for the investigation. They got a warrant to open the file and look through them, but with more than 100,000 of them and only two weeks before election day, there is no way they could read them all in time, as it took people specially trained in what to look for as they read them.

The dilemma put before Comey was whether or not to reveal that the investigation into Hillary Clinton was reopened or to conceal it until after the election. If he reveals this, it could have an impact on the election. If he doesn’t, the media will report it anyway and it will look like he’s hiding something, undermining America’s confidence in the FBI.

After talking it over with many people and knowing that no matter which option he picked it was going to look bad, he decided to reveal to the American people that the investigation of Hillary’s emails had been reopened. His job was to care about the integrity of the FBI, not whether or not this influenced an election, and looking at the polls, no one seriously thought Trump would win anyway.

For this, Comey was excoriated, treated coldly, and even hated by Hillary and many surrounding him in meetings at the White House. People refused to make eye contact, talk to him, or acknowledge his presence. He felt like a ghost. Still, many were sympathetic to how tough that decision was and reached out to him with sympathy and support.

After Trump won the election, Obama, though he tirelessly campaigned for Hillary and wanted badly for her to win, told Comey he nominated him because he believed he was a man of integrity who would do the right thing, and that nothing that happened in the past year changed his perspective on this.

Comey notes that he didn’t vote for Obama, he didn’t vote in 2016, and that his wife and kids voted for Hillary Clinton. Any insinuation that he saved Hillary Clinton from criminal activity or sabotaged her presidential bid and helped Trump in any way was deeply upsetting to him. He was just doing his job.

Trump now elected, the FBI had to brief him on Putin’s interference in the election, and Comey was asked to brief him one-on-one about the Steele Dossier, in which Russia claimed to have footage of Trump with prostitutes in a Russian hotel room in 2013 in which the prostitutes peed on each other on the bed, and that they planned to use the footage as blackmail.

When the FBI told Trump about Putin’s election interference, there were no follow up questions like how did they do it, how do we prevent it from happening again, and what steps should be taken against them. They only wanted to minimize the damage by insuring Americans that Putin had no influence on Trump’s victory. Comey was shocked that they were deliberating their spin right in front of them. “Intelligence does facts, the White House does politics and spin.”

Comey told Trump about the dossier and he immediately became defensive, denying the allegations, asking if he looked like the kind of guy who needed prostitutes. When Comey explained that he just wanted to protect the president from blackmail, that the FBI didn’t believe the allegations, and that he wasn’t under investigation, Trump calmed down.

Four days later, Buzzfeed released details from the dossier. Trump tweeted: FAKE NEWS—A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT! He called Comey the next day to tell him he didn’t stay overnight at the hotel, was only there to change his clothes, that he knew he was being recorded, and that he flew in and out the same night. Being a germaphobe, he assured Comey that he would never let anyone pee on a bed near him. Comey thought Trump needn’t stay overnight to be with prostitutes, and the suite was big enough that he needn’t be in the bed with the prostitutes when they peed on it, allegedly because the Obamas had once slept in that bed, but didn’t say any of this out loud.

Trump was convinced he had the biggest inauguration crowd ever—definitely bigger than Obama’s—when no amount of spinning the facts, pictures, and data could justify this. Nothing would change his mind. Comey would come to find that Trump lived in a world of his own making.

Trump arranged a private dinner for Comey in the Green Room at the White House, which was strange, because there was protocol for setting up these meetings through proper channels, and he never attended these meetings alone. These meetings needed to be recorded as official meetings and the contents of the meetings disclosed to his team. He told Trump there needed to be a separation between the FBI and the president for both of their good, and previous presidents understood this.

After praising Comey for doing a great job, noting that everyone spoke of him in high regard, and hoping he would stay on as FBI director, he let him know that others wanted his job. Comey assured him that he had no desire to quit the job he loved and could be relied on to always tell the truth. “I need loyalty. I expect loyalty,” Trump said. Comey didn’t respond. They stared each other in the eyes for a few seconds and moved on.

In a long stream of consciousness monologue, Trump went on about his sexual assault allegations, Hillary’ emails, his inauguration crowd size, that he didn’t mock a disabled reporter, the luxury of living in the White House, and the viciousness of the campaign. He never left room for response or feedback, so believed everyone simply agreed with him. This wasn’t the proper way for a leader to rapport with a subordinate. He simply didn’t know the protocol of past presidents, why they couldn’t be on chummy terms, and how scandalous it was to meet alone with an FBI director and ask for loyalty, starting with putting his job security on the table.

Trump said Chief of Staff Reince Priebus didn’t know they were meeting, which seemed incredible to Comey, then later in the conversation said he did know. Why lie about it? Trump then asked Comey to investigate the golden showers claim to prove it didn’t happen. Comey explained that it is very difficult to prove that something didn’t happen, and the American public would interpret that as an investigation on him, which wouldn’t look good.

Trump again asked for loyalty. Comey said he would get honesty. “That’s what I want, honest loyalty,” Trump said, as if a bargain had been struck. “You will get that from me,” Comey said, uncomfortable and desperate to end the conversation.

Comey notes that someone so experienced in business and leadership should know that ethical leaders never ask for personal loyalty. They care about how they lead, have a confidence that breeds humility, and are open to feedback and being wrong. They understand that they need to trust others to tell them the truth so they can make effective decisions.

Comey made it a practice to keep notes on his personal meetings with Trump because he didn’t trust Trump to recollect their meetings accurately and worried that he might use them against him one day. After every personal meeting with Trump, Comey met with his team and debriefed, wrote a memo of the contents of their conversation, and left one copy with the FBI and another in a safe at home.

Reince Priebus invited Comey to the White House for a 20-minute meeting to learn more about the protocol between intelligence and the White House, and after explaining to him that a distance must be kept between the president and him for both of their good and that they should only meet formally and through the correct protocols, Priebus asked if he would like to see the president. “I’m sure he’d love to see you!” Comey refused twice, wondering if Priebus had heard anything he’d just said in their meeting, but he insisted, taking him to the Oval Office.

In that meeting, Trump went into another stream of consciousness rant in which he spoke but never left space for others in the room to respond. Bill O’Reilly had just asked Trump in a pre-Super Bowl interview why he respected Putin, a man who kills his own citizens and others, and why he wouldn’t outright condemn him. Trump said he respected Putin, even if he might not get along with him. O’Reilly stated again that he was a killer. Trump responded, “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What do you think? Our country is so innocent?”

This became a lighting rod of criticism across the aisles. Trump thought he gave a good answer to a tough question, but Comey, for the first time, spoke up and told Trump his first answer was good, but not the second one. “We aren’t the kind of killers that Putin is.” Trump abruptly ended the meeting, not used to being challenged, and Comey knew from then on that they wouldn’t have a friendly rapport, which he thought a good thing.

“Still, the encounter left me shaken. I’d never seen anything like it in the Oval Office. As I found myself thrust into Trump’s orbit, I was once again having flashbacks to my earlier career as a prosecutor against the Mob. The silent circle of assent. The boss in complete control. The loyalty oaths. The us-versus-them worldview. The lying about all things, large and small, in service to some code of loyalty that put the organization above morality and above the truth.” (251)

After the next intelligence briefing at the White House, Trump asked everyone to leave the room but Comey when the meeting ended. He wanted to crack down on those leaking classified information to reporters and explained that he had to fire Michael Flynn for misleading the Vice President Mike Pence. Flynn was under FBI investigation for colluding with a Russian ambassador, which he lied about when interviewed by FBI agents. Trump said Flynn was a good guy and asked him to “let this go.” In other words, to do him a favor and stop the investigation. Comey again wrote a memo of the meeting and shared it with his team in case Trump would later try to deny the conversation ever happened. He asked AG Jeff Sessions to make sure he was never alone with Trump again, but he couldn’t insure that.

Trump called Comey, wondering if perhaps FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe had something against him because he was hard on his wife Jill, who ran for Virginia state legislature in 2015 and lost. Trump believed, falsely, that Hillary Clinton had given money to Jill, so the FBI was soft on Hillary in return. Comey assured Trump that most FBI agents lean right, Andrew was a Republican, and he was a professional who could put all personal matters aside to do his job well.

Trump said the Russia investigation was a cloud over him, keeping him from doing his job well, and it was hurting Melania. What could he do to lift the cloud? Comey said the FBI was working as quickly and thoroughly as possible. Trump wanted the message to the American public to be clear that he wasn’t personally under investigation.

Two weeks later Trump called, irritated that the cloud of the investigation was still over him. Comey told him he reported his request to the acting deputy attorney general and had not heard back, so the White House councel should contact the leadership of the DOJ to make the request. Trump said he would do that, “Because I have been very loyal to you, very loyal. We had that thing, you know.” Comey assumed that by “that thing” he was referring to the private dinner in the green room at the White House.

On May 9, 2017, while in the middle of a speaking to an audience at a Diversity Agent Recruiting event in L.A., Comey stopped mid-speech when he saw on the TVs behind the audience various news stations with the words COMEY RESIGNS and COMEY FIRED. No one had notified him. He completed his speech, met with everyone and shook hands, then tried to find out what was happening.

He was blindsided when the memo on his firing said his conduct was awful and unacceptable. This made no sense, given his impeccable reputation and having received nothing but praise from the Trump team. He was unjustly defamed, as it was claimed that the FBI was in disarray and being poorly led, which wasn’t true. What Trump told those close to him was he fired Comey to relieve pressure on the Russia investigation. Many reached out to him to report their shock and dismay at how disrespectful and unjust this firing was after such a long and impeccable record.

Trump was furious, seeing footage on the news of Comey flying back from L.A. to Washington on an FBI plane. He called McCabe and asked that it be investigated. He wanted to know who authorized the use of the place for Comey. McCabe said he himself authorized it because the plane and staff needed to return to DC and that it was the FBI’s job to see to it that Comey return home safely. Trump exploded, saying Comey was never allowed back on FBI property ever again. He was not allowed to say goodbye to his team and coworkers. His stuff was shipped to him. Angry, Trump asked McCabe, “Your wife lost the election in Virginia, didn’t she?” “Yes, she did,” he replied. “Ask her how it feels to be a loser,” he said, and hung up.

On May 12, Trump tweeted that Comey had better hope there were no tapes of their conversations before he decided to start leaking to the press. Comey had no intention of going to the press, but realized if Trump did record their conversations, then also recorded was Trump in the Oval Office asking Comey in private to drop the Flynn investigation. This would be scandalous.

Comey decided to share unclassified information from his personal memos about his conversations with Trump in which he was asked to drop the FBI investigation of Flynn. This is freedom of speech and press, not “leaking” unclassified information as some pundits wrongly claimed. Comey just wanted to tell the truth.

Comey noted that lacking kindness, humility, empathy, and respect for truth, Trump can’t keep around him the kinds of people a president needs to speak truth to him. He is unethical and untethered to truth and institutional values. His leadership is transactional, ego-driven, and about personal loyalty.

He further notes that it is hypocritical and morally wrong for right wing pundits and evangelical faith leaders to look the other way and ignore this dangerous behavior because they find some of Trump’s policies and court appointments favorable. They would never let Obama or Clinton get away with this behavior. “What is happening now is not normal. It’s not fake news. It’s not okay.”

Every organization has its flaws, Comey notes, but it’s not okay to sit idly by and watch the president destroy norms and traditions and brazenly undermine confidence in law enforcement institutions meant to keep him in check. Thinking about what’s right for the country must come before political or personal loyalty.

Comey is optimistic that whatever damage Trump does will be temporary and pass, and hopefully this afford good conversation about our need to value truth, integrity, respect, tolerance, and ethical leadership.

A Review of Jordan Peterson's Maps of Meaning Lecture Series

In the Maps of Meaning lecture series, Jordan Peterson draws from many disciplines like religion, mythology, philosophy, biology, psychology, anthropology, sociology, political theory, art, and history to make the case that human brains have evolved to create meaning and tell stories; to structure everything we experience by myths and archetypes—or universal and important stories told over and over again.

What he challenges is the idea that humans are blank slates onto which facts present themselves and that we create value, meaning, and narratives from them after the fact. Peterson makes the case that value, meaning, and framing life in archetypes arise from the way our brain is evolved and how its neuroprocessing works. For instance, the ability to speak a language is preloaded in the brain. When the baby is born, it babbles phonics heard in every language. The potential for language is already there. The baby then zeroes in on the language of its environment and mimics that. Just as the brain is preloaded with the potential for development of language, it is preloaded to create meaning and narrative. As data arrives, your brain is already sorting and categorizing and discriminating what is meaningful to it and its goals, and doing this subconsciously without your conscious permission because that’s what it is evolved to do. You can only notice that you experience reality the way your brain has arranged it for you.

Peterson spends time in these lectures going over a few Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Babylonian, Jewish, Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist myths and stories to make the case that they all have similar or universal archetypes in them, or important takeaways for wisdom. The same archetypes can be found in Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty, Pinocchio, The Lion King, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Star Wars.

While Peterson believes he is deriving such complex wisdom from these stories and comparing them for their common archetypes, it seems to me that he’s reading all of that complexity into these stories and creating patterns of similarity rather by ignoring their stand-alone context. His long and infamous lecture series on reading the Bible through an archetypal lens depends on the same procedure. Just how many archetypes are there? No one knows. They can be multiplied endlessly.

Joseph Campbell, one of the most influential and popular mythologists in the past century was famous for scouring the world’s myths and religions for universal themes and seeing them as one, despite differences in details. His concept of the hero with a thousand faces says there is a single hero archetype played out in a thousand different specific heroes in a thousand different stories: usually that the hero is confronted with tragedy and evil and is then pulled into a quest where he can never go back, but must go into the unknown, face great danger, and return with something valuable and share it with humanity.

Critics of Campbell believe he is doing a disservice to specific, individual myths developed in different times, places, and cultures to speak to different needs and situations by trying to make them seem more universal than they really. Peterson is aware that he is doing the same as Campbell and sees the Bible both as a collection of stories written by specific people in specific times and places, therefore full of contradictions when collected as a whole, and as a collection of stories edited over time to reference and draw from one another and over again to create unified themes as a whole. It’s just a matter of which of these you intend to focus on in your analysis.

So does Peterson succeed in proving his thesis that certain archetypes arise over and over again in myths and stories because they are universal and birthed from the structure of our brain? I don’t know. It’s an interesting hypothesis that people far better informed than I am in these areas have criticized.

So is all lost if this project fails? No. There is much to learn from archetypes and universal truths, even if the specific myths and stories Peterson used to make his case don’t always map onto these archetypes comfortably. There is plenty of wisdom in these lectures, much of which is derived from psychology and his years of clinical practice as a therapist.

Yes, these lectures contain the expected jabs at Marxism, socialism, postmodernism, and the state of universities being social justice indoctrination centers that curtail free speech for ideology. But there are also jabs at Hitler, Nazis, totalitarianism, and online men’s communities that think poorly of women. Hardly what you would expect from an alt-right Nazi who fuels men to be misogynists as his critics are fond of saying.

What I got from these lectures has little to do with his thesis, but more with practical advice on dealing with how to rebuild your life once tragedy and chaos has disillusioned, disoriented, and destroyed you, and how to avoid becoming bitter, resentful, and wanting to die, encouraging listeners to get in touch with what’s meaningful to them, pay attention to their values, rise from the ashes, take responsibility, stand up straight, face the world, and create order from chaos. He encourages listeners to risk believing that life is good and that what they do is worth it despite the evil and chaos in them and all around them, and that what they do matters. No matter how bleak it looks, the potential to live a deep, rich, meaningful life is always in front of you. I’m thankful for that kind of encouragement.

Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief - Jordan Peterson - 12 - Final: The Divinity of the Individual (Lecture Notes)

[I did not watch this lecture. These notes are slightly modified from another person's blog.]

Peterson starts the final lecture by reminding us of the essential problem that he has laid out in the beginning of his lectures—that of belief systems. What constitutes belief systems and why are people willing to engage in conflict to maintain and expand them?

Belief systems orient us in the world and matter psychologically. Some are superior and others inferior.

Science describes objective reality but has no bearing on our subjective reality. We cannot derive an ought from an is. There are too many pathways you can derive from scientific truths. You have no way of knowing which scientific truth should be most relevant without invoking your subjective interpretation. That is the postmodernist problem: there are too many facts to be able to coherently determine values. If there was an inquiry into values, assuming they are divorced from science, what would it look like?

Jung suggested that we inhabit archetypal myths. Neuroscientific ideas echo a similar idea to that. Kant suggested that we use an a priori structure when interacting with the world. Piaget described the constraints we have in the social world, and that’s what limits the infinite number of possible interpretations of how we ought to behave. Our constraints are both biological and sociological. These ideas lay the foundations to the answer to the postmodern conundrum.

To know if one solution matches the problem of how to orient yourself in the world, you should test it. In other words, it must be functional. Maslow outlined our basic needs for survival. These needs differ in degree but are universal.

Piaget concluded that the set of games that are played voluntarily outcompete the set of games that are played by force. In other words, regardless of what the game is, the fact of whether it was voluntary or not is the most important factor to consider. This is a good argument against tyranny. And the same idea is used in chimp hierarchies where tyrants often lose to other chimps who collude against them. The idea that our identity is a blank slate then, is unwarranted. We have numerous in-built constraints.

The stories of mythology have to be both memorable and useful. The main objection to deriving meaning from stories is that there are too many interpretations (same as the criticism against deriving moral values from science). But the answer to that is that the meaning from stories are derived from multiple levels of analysis outside of stories – they are derived neurologically, psychologically, and socially.

When you fail at achieving a goal, such as getting another person to be attracted to you, you may feel like your entire belief structure is jeopardized. And while it’s not the best course of action to think so extremely, it’s not irrational. If your system of values and actions fail to produce your intended outcomes, it’s not irrational to assume that there is something wrong with the system, or that you need a new one.

The existential landscape consists of order and chaos. Explored territory and unexplored territory. That’s what the structure of stories is like. It also defines your relationships with your friends. They slowly reveal new parts of themselves to you. You don’t want to be friends or in a relationship with someone who is too predictable (order) or too chaotic.

When you encounter an anomaly, you use the same neurological circuit that detects predators. That’s the dragon of chaos or the snake in the garden. But the dragon symbol is deeper, it hoards treasure. Despite its capacity to kill you, it offers you the possibility of something valuable in return.

“The thing you don’t know about is the greatest gift. Error is an infinite source of information.”

When someone you are talking to says something you don’t agree with, or that surprises you, that’s when you learn new things. If you’re constantly in a state of order, you don’t learn anything. But it’s not always easy to recover from too much chaos.

If a problem is small, but noticeable, don’t ignore it. If you’re in a relationship, you need to first notice that there is a problem that is manifesting itself across multiple situations. Then you need to confront the person and you need to then ignore their tears. Then you’ll be able to discuss the problem. Most people don’t do that. You need to be tough to be willing to go through multiple layers of challenges before reaching a solution. But if you don’t, the problems accrue until they becomes too large.

“If you continue to be a slave, you will continue to give rise to tyrants.” Solzhenitsyn said that a society falls apart because of the accumulation of small mistakes. If you allow yourself to be taken advantage of, you will be taken advantage of. And you will simultaneously encourage that person to take advantage of other people. The counter to that is to be articulate enough to formulate arguments and brave enough to stand up for them. Naivety will never protect you from tyranny.

A wealthy man complains to Christ about his troubles, and Christ’s answer was for him to leave his wealth behind and follow him. Some people interpret this as a critique of wealth, but it’s actually a critique of attachment.

A main impediment to enlightenment is attachment. This doesn’t mean you should have no wants, but that it is necessary to be willing to give up what you value most to evolve. And that’s a very difficult to do. This point is made in The Brothers Karamazov.

Christ makes a return to the world, but the inquisitor tells Christ (while imprisoned) that the burden he put his people through was too much, that they had built a society where his teachings were watered down so that more people are able to live by them. Christ then kisses the inquisitor on the lips, and the inquisitor runs away terrified, leaving the cell door open for Christ. The story is remarkable and could be interpreted as an attack on the Catholic Church for refusing to acknowledge Christ’s arrival and letting go of control. But what makes the story even more remarkable is that the inquisitor left the door open. Dostoevsky managed to give a balanced critique of the Catholic Church at one of its darkest periods.

To transform into a better individual, you burn off your previous identity. Not being willing to do that will hinder how well you adjust to life’s demands.

The first thing you should do is orient yourself in the world. In the game of Quidditch in Harry Potter, there are games within games. The most important game involves the snitch—a winged ball. The round chaos contains the initial material the world is made of. It’s made of mercury, which is interpreted as the subconscious manifesting itself in your waking life. If Harry catches the snitch, he wins the entire game.

Too much conflict and too little conflict are both bad for relationships. If you tell someone they are a bad person and list all the reasons for why you think that’s the case, you will probably not go very far. But avoiding conflict completely will place you in stasis. The question becomes how to operate somewhere in between those two extremes.

“Meaning is what manifests itself when you’ve oriented yourself properly and when you’ve optimized the flow of information between you and chaos.” In other words, you want to be moving in the right direction and in a state of flow where things are neither too challenging nor too easy.

Meaning is the perception of being in the right place. However, it can be pathologized. That’s why there’s a call to virtue in most religions. If you warp and twist the inputs and blind yourself to reality, you will not be able to orient yourself properly. You must maintain a pristine, honest relationship with the world. There is no certainty in life. But this is the best path forward. It is to try to get your act together, to avoid cynicism, and to pursue something that is meaningful to you.

The goals you set must strike a balance between order and chaos. You should do things that are slightly out of reach but still realistic to pursue. You should aim to be an entity that is self-correcting, that is constantly solving problems and developing ways to solve problems more effectively.

Accepting something means taking responsibility for it. You cannot feel responsible for something you do not accept.

“A little knowledge of death will destroy you. The only way to overcome death is the complete voluntary acceptance of it.”

Meaning can be a gage to help you know if you’re on the right track or not. If you live a life where you are constantly overwhelmed with challenges, your life will have a lot responsibility and meaning, but such a lifestyle is unsustainable in the long run. You will eventually burn out. And of course, if you have no responsibility, your life has no meaning.

The ideal is to experience just enough chaos (challenges) to be able to experience self-renewal and growth, while simultaneously having the opportunity to recover. Take on as much as you can handle while living a life you can sustain for 30 years into the future. Having that mindset is a lot better for you than the alternatives.

You don’t find meaning by asking someone to tell you how well it will work out for you. It’s your destiny to find that out. You need to act as if Being is good even though there are good reasons to think it’s not. Assuming that Being is good is a leap faith. But to play this game you must be all in. And the great thing about life is that you’re already all in.

“Why not pick the best thing possible that you can do? Why not do that? Maybe you can justify your wretched existence to yourself that way. I think you could. That’s what it looks like! People find such meaning in the responsibility they adopt, it stops making them ask questions about what life is for.”

Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief - Jordan Peterson - 11 - The Flood and the Tower (Lecture Notes)

[I did not watch this lecture. These notes are slightly modified from someone else's blog]

Peterson starts the lecture by summarizing his views against postmodernism, and why sacrifice is the right path forward. Instead of having a belief system and then trying to get the world to subscribe to it by demanding rights it is wiser and more useful to carry the burden of personal responsibility on your own. GPS is an intelligent system that is not dogmatic. It readjusts and recalibrates. Similarly, you will be forced to reassess your views about the world. The ideal is not having the best belief system, it is the ability to adapt your belief systems to new information. The idea of sacrifice is key. If you want to be adaptable, you have to be willing to sacrifice your previous judgments about the world. 

In the story of Adam and Eve, the snake represents an archetypal limit. The snake not only is a predator, but is symbolic of all things that are predators. It represents the essence of evil. But evil doesn’t just exist externally, it exists within you. And coming to terms with your shadow is the cure to naivety.

“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.” Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

People are afraid of confronting the monster within, but they should try to do so voluntarily. The alternative is that the shadow takes you down an evil route involuntarily (School shooting). The solution to post traumatic stress is in gaining a more sophisticated philosophy of evil. The Egyptian myth: Confront Seth, lose an eye, and reunite with Osiris. Integrate your shadow. Predators choose naïve victims who are unaware of the shadow in themselves and in others. Without a sophisticated philosophy of evil, you will have no way to defend yourself against predation. You should learn about malevolence and become dangerous. Those are the two defenses against malevolence.

When you overprotect your children, you turn them into easy prey. They will eventually face chaos and tragedy and realize that protection from authority is no longer sufficient.

Exposure to what you are afraid of leads you to learn that you are tougher than you think. Men who are afraid of their father’s judgment in their 30s and 40s should come to terms with the limitations of the knowledge of their fathers. The all-knower doesn’t exist, you must cultivate a stronger self.

The only way to get tough is through exposure to malevolence, danger, and fear. Become self-reliant; no more dependence on authority for answers. One bad solution to chaos that people often resort to is grasping on to old forms of order and tyranny.

In psychotherapy, it’s a mistake to try to solve other people’s problems. Instead, you should let them become a better solver of problems. That’s the Oedipal problem—not allowing the child to become stronger by overprotecting them.

The permanent problem that exists is the inevitable death of your perceptual scheme. The only solution is to have an adaptive perceptual scheme. Be willing and capable of altering your world view whenever required.

The story of Cain and Abel happens after original paradise has collapsed. Adam and Eve are outside history, but Cain and Abel is considered inside history. The hostile brothers is an archetypical motif. Cain’s philosophy is “To hell with it.” Abel’s philosophy is “Make things better.”

Archetype is something you cannot push beyond. Christ’s death is an archetypal limit because the worst possible malevolence was inflicted on the best possible person.

Cain and Abel also represent an archetypical limit in the same way. Cain (the most evil) destroys Abel (the most good). Cain destroys his own ideal (who he aims to become).

Cain is a farmer while Abel is a shepherd. Shepherds had to be very tough to survive. The older brother (Cain) was destined to inherit more possessions and you might think he is lucky. But Cain is not favored by God.

Wealth can be a problem, even today. Children who are raised in wealthy conditions are deprived of privation. And the only way to become more mature is through necessity. Parents find it difficult to say no to their children when they have money, but they are not doing their children any favors psychologically. The children find that what they want is devalued while their desires grow. That’s not helpful. Children need to hit the right limitations. Having no limits imposed them endows them with a worldview that is different from how the world really works.

The idea of sacrifice was central to the story of Cain and Abel. The understanding was that the only way to benefit in the future would be to sacrifice something valuable in the present. The story doesn’t make it obvious that Cain didn’t sacrifice enough, but it subtly hints at that idea. In life, whenever you find something has been causing you suffering, the best thing to do would be to drop it. In other words, sacrificing what’s valuable to you.

When primitive societies ceremonially sacrifice each other and animals for the gods, don’t dismiss them as stupid. Sacrificing someone often kept other kinds of aggression at bay and stabilized society, and it’s important to remember that we evolved from primates. To be able to develop a sophisticated and counterintuitive notion of sacrifice was no easy feat. It took thousands of years of trial and error to understand its value, and eventually those who understood it had a survivalist advantage over those who didn’t.

“If people impede your development, you should sacrifice your relationship with them.”

The idea of inequality can be seen through Cain. He thinks he is making all the right sacrifices, and yet he achieves nothing while his brother Abel—seemingly making the same sacrifices—gets whatever he wants. And worse, he’s a good guy and everyone likes him. In today’s world, it is tempting to think that it’s inequality that fuels violence and suffering, but it’s more likely that anger at inequality is the culprit. The more violent areas are not those that have the lowest living standards but the ones that have the most inequality. Is the right course of action to rebel against the system, or to make the right sacrifices?

Cain’s choice was to brood in resentment and murder his ideal. He rebelled against the social contract and against the logos. And when he confronts God about it before murdering Abel, God tells him that it’s his fault. Not only that, but he tells him that he intentionally invited an evil cat into his house and allowed it to interlock with him and have evil offspring. His blindness to malevolence got him to this point and there is no one to blame but himself. After Cain kills Abel, God questions him about what he had done. There is a parallel here to Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov before and after killing the old woman are different people.

It’s simple to assume that Hitler wanted to win, but it’s clear that he did not have good intentions. He could have not demolished people (Jews and gypsies) and could have used them for labor. But his proclivity for revenge mirrors that of Cain and it is more likely that he wanted destruction than the victory he promised and preached.

The theory of nations going to war for natural resources is an oversimplified understanding. It is more likely that motivations for war are deeper and more psychologically vindictive and malevolent. People have managed to survive peacefully with very little.

The Bible contains many self-contradictions, but that’s only one level of analysis. You don’t have to take it literally to derive value from it. The sequence of events in it, however, is not random.

The descendants of Cain go on to build institutions. But the flood eventually comes. Recall the murder of Absu, which results in the destruction of the cultural structure. Similarly, Cain is rejecting the cultural structure. Tiamat is God of salt water is paralleled by the idea of the flood in the Bible.

Eliade stipulates that whatever you build will eventually decay if you leave it alone. A similar motif exists in the story of Osiris. You have a moral contract with the things that you own to preserve them. That’s what you do with a car or any project you start.

Another example is the New Orleans flood. They are a corrupt state that built a dam that could last 100 years, when the Dutch created one that could last 10,000 years. Entropy is inevitable, but willful blindness accelerates the process of destruction. You can blame nature (the mother) but insufficient order from within (the father) is more often the problem.

The story of Noah and the story of Cain are preludes to the story of the Messiah. The way to withstand chaos according to these stories is to identify with the state (culture), and to have the power to transform, to walk forthrightly and honestly alongside God.

Noah makes the proper sacrifices with the coming of the flood because he was prepared. After the passing of the flood, creation is reborn. God tells Noah that he won’t smite all of humanity again and then lays out some rules.

The Tower of Babel comes after the flood. As the group of human beings try to build a tower that reaches to the sky and challenge God’s dominion, which angers God, the people start to fractionate. This is a universal feature of groups.

The ideal is to have a group large enough so that you can be protected, but small enough so that you are relevant to it. In the story of the Tower, the group becomes too large—like what has been happening to the EU. The people in the story no longer spoke the same language and dispersed to different far away areas.

The Tower story is placed right after the Flood story. The Flood story contains nihilistic chaos while the Tower story contains the totalitarian temptation to build hyper structures to replace the transcendent. The result is decay. The prophets have warned of the temptation to refuse to be subservient to a higher ideal. It’s what also results in the deterioration of the larger groups in the story.

In the Q&A, Peterson was asked why most of his viewers and subscribers of the Self-Authoring program are mostly men. He replied that it’s not because of his political stances. His viewership was mostly male (85%) even before the political issues arose. It boils down to two things: agreeableness and responsibility. On the extremes, men and women are very different even though they’re similar on average. Men on average are disagreeable and women are agreeable. Men often refuse to take orders and prefer to do nothing with their time instead. When Peterson spoke to his audiences, he noticed that “men’s eyes lit up” when he talked about responsibility. Men are starving for that message today. To them, there is nothing but responsibility. Self-authoring helps them find a goal that they want to accomplish.

Non-western ethnic minorities, and generally groups that weren’t doing so well and had an ambivalent relationship with education, have seen the most marked improvement after going through the self-authoring process.

Lifting a load, as useless as you are, is your first step to redemption. The charm of Homer Simpson exists in his courageous and admirable quest to take care of his family despite his shortcomings and incompetence. The key is choice. “People will carry a heavy load if they get to pick up the goddamn load.”

Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief - Jordan Peterson - 10 - Genesis and the Buddha (Lecture Notes)

Peterson started this class partially hoping to explain why people defend their belief systems and why they are found valuable. Belief systems regulate people’s emotions by helping them orient themselves in the world so that what they do matches what they want in the social environment where they are successful. People defend their beliefs systems because they are used to make sense of the world and then to act out making sense of the world with everyone around them. 

What happens when two groups of people have different beliefs systems? You can give yours up for theirs, you can fight, or you can assimilate. Could you deconstruct your beliefs to find essential principles or guidelines to find similarities despite their differences? Can we find viable principles in them?

Communism and capitalism are ideologies pitted against each other. Are their differences meaningful to debate or as postmodernists say, they are both just power games and debate is meaningless?

Universities are now making it mandatory to take classes in equity, which is equality of outcome, teaching that wherever there isn’t equality the system is corrupt and must be destroyed. But we can endlessly multiply categories of people in society and their inequalities so the notion is futile. The only way to have total equality is if everyone has nothing. Why are these ideas returning with such force when history shows the bloody carnage that resulted in trying to implement these ideas?

Are there principles that Western civilization is based on that are more than mere opinion? Nietzsche said if you take the core principles out of society the whole system shakes and crumbles. When we kill God or transcendent values, what’s left? Dostoyevski was working on this at the same time in Crime and Punishment. A character in that book wants to solve multiple problems by killing someone, believing the only thing holding him back is arbitrary moral convention. He commits the crime and hell breaks loose. Dostoyevsky is investigating the idea that with no God or transcendent or higher values anything goes.

Peterson is frustrated with Sam Harris and radical atheists who believe that we can abandon the transcendent and be purely rational. Naked self-interest is completely rational. Harming others to get what I want is completely rational. Where is the pathway from the rational to an egalitarian virtue? Why the hell not every man for himself? It’s a fairly coherent philosophy that can be implemented in the world with a great level of success. The ethics Harris and Dawkins take for granted as rational come from a long history of mythology. You don’t get to wipe that out and assume that the ethics it delivers are just rationally axiomatic.

You don’t have to argue for the existence of God. You can say God is our ethics personified. The point is, western civilization bases its ethics on God. What’s at the bottom of the idea of a transcendent value? How can we address this without appealing to metaphysics? We can say God can be anything. What—if anything—is our culture predicated on?

Out of Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky came Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who wrote The Gulag Archipelago and documented the horrors and atrocities that resulted from trying to implement state-based equality. Why don’t students learn about this in college when taught left wing politics? The system didn’t work because it was predicated on the wrong values. Whatever we’re doing in the West works despite its flaws.

Solzhenitsyn advised that Russia return to Orthodox Christianity, making him a reactionary in the eyes of his critics. If people don’t return to transcendent values they are vulnerable to pathological ideologies and the murderous impulses that come with them.

Nietzsche said we had to create out own values, becoming supermen, to replace God, which was a bad idea. If you are the giver of values, you inflate yourself into a demigod and announce the values you thrust forth. What’s to keep you humble? Hitler didn’t create himself or Nazi Germany, it was co-created with the Germans. He became the mouthpiece of their darkest desires and they fueled each other.

Jung studied Nietzsche in great detail and saw the flaws in the idea that we must create our own values. Jung and Freud paid attention to dreams and their language and that there is great significance to them. They were informative. Freud wrote The Interpretation of Dreams and saw them as wish fulfillments and that the primary motivation of human beings are sexual. Jung wrote Symbols of Transformation about the fantasies of an American schizophrenic woman and relating them to mythology.

Myths are birthed from dreams, which a mode of information presentation. They both share a narrative structure and are narrative-like. They are movies that play in your head, like daydreams, involuntarily. Dreams, like thoughts, think and dream in you. What are they, what are they thinking, and why?

Freud thought dreams were sneaky and cryptic because they want to tell you what your conscious mind doesn’t want to hear, tied up in the idea of repression. Jung disagreed, believing dreams are being is clear as possible, it’s just the best they can do. They are the birthplace of thought the same way artists are the birthplace of culture. Your mind is groping outward to try to comprehend what it has not yet comprehend by trying to mapping it to image. It’s incoherent because it’s not a full-fledged thought. It’s potential that could be clarified and brought into reality.

From where to thoughts come to pop into our head, the void? The gold Buddha sitting in the image of the lotus is an image of the lotus bursting up from the bottom into fruition. Maybe these ideas have roots. There seems to be a necessary pattern in morality that is intrinsic and manifested in culture and isn’t just arbitrary or learned. The dialogue between culture and nature that tries to make the proper articulation of that spring forward in each individual. Your nature strives so you can manifest yourself properly in the world and culture is meant to aid you in that.

Piaget had some interesting ideas, hoping to reconcile science and religion. He was interested in the spontaneous morality the developed in children as they played together. What is central to all of them? What’s the ideal?

The dominance hierarchy is in your biology. You become healthier and experience wellbeing at every level physically, emotionally, and psychologically when doing the right thing, and we put the right thing at the top. It’s anything but arbitrary opinion.

When you look at the night sky, you project gods into the cosmos and populate the unknown with deities from your imagination. When you remove them from the cosmos, do they go away? No, they back to your imagination. The corpses of your gods live in your imagination, so where do you go to revivify them? Your imagination. What’s down there? Just mess and catastrophe, or is it patterned? Order in the form of archetypes exist down there—structure looking for things to fill it with.

We are predisposed to language. We babble all possible phonics as babies and can potentially speak any language until we absorb a language from our culture and fill those babblings with words. Similarly, we are predisposed to thinking in archetypes and fill this with data.

A fundamental question of existence is why keep struggling? If you cut off one head on a hydra and more keep coming in endless struggle and suffering, why go on? Is life really worth living? Why not just kill yourself and end the game? People who have become truly malevolent answer that life is worth destroying. It’s not irrational to work for the destruction of being. It might be the most rational thing you can come up with depending on your presuppositions.

Jung sees the birthplace of archetypal ideas in the imagination. They are representations of patterns of adaptive behavior that have evolved collectively. We determine morals and ethics together by figuring them out over history.

There is nothing more noble than encountering the unknown and articulating what you find. This will make you practically successful. You’ll be admired by men, selected by women, and practically successful in life. Your ideals are trying to manifest themselves and make themselves known to you, which is what religious education is for. We’ve lost that.

The hero goes out into chaos and makes order, then when order becomes too rigid and oppressive you bring it to chaos and restructure it to improve it.

Joseph Campbell is a mediator between Jung and general culture, but all of his ideas come from Jung.

The story of the Buddha is almost a perfect parallel structurally to the story of Adam and Eve. Are we imposing structure on the story or are there archetypes that underlie them that we simply notice?

The Bible was authored by multiple people over long periods of time and organized later into a collective story out of which the sense arises. It evolved from bottom up. We acted first and made sense of it later. Information is encoded in action and we don’t know why that’s the case. The best you can do is dream yourself up and bring it into articulated existence. Most of the time you don’t even know what you’re up to and have little control, so good luck trying to control someone else.

The reason the Bible has so many contradictions is because dreams have so many contradictions. Too much coherence loses the unarticulated richness in the premature attempt at coherence. Waking thought sacrifices completeness for coherence and dream thought sacrifices coherence for completeness. Precise thought excludes too much (left hemisphere, linguistically mediated, sequential, logical) and imprecise thought is not sufficiently coherent (right hemisphere, imagistic, emotion based) so we do both. The right hemisphere wants a picture of everything so it’s not precise, so the left articulates for precision and clear action but loses richness. The Bible is half dream and half articulated thought which has the advantages and disadvantages of both. We have to face everything thougt we don’t understand anything completely. We need the interplay of dream and articulation.

A healthy family functions in which all the individuals thrive and the family is strong. The individual benefits along with the group and keeps bringing one another up. That’s the goal of a healthy society. You try to maintain what is stable because it falls apart easily. An orchestra is comprised of individuals doing their part to create a harmonious symphony and everything comes into coherence. All levels of being are stacked coherently. Everyone is having a good time. It’s a glimpse of paradise.

The first stories of Genesis are unidentifiably ancient. God only knows how old they are. Oral traditions can last centuries. They are repeated and acted out. There is a place in history past which we cannot look. Everything pops up about 5,000 years go and everything before that is lost.

Where is the meaning in a literary work? It’s the words in relation to the sentences in relation to the paragraphs in relation to the chapters in relation to the book in relation to culture in which the book is produced.

The Bible endlessly cross-references itself and tries to connect everything to everything to create coherence. You can pull out meanings at one level of analysis that you can’t at another. You can focus on a particular story or see how it’s used in coherence with the bigger story which changes the meaning.

To believe the Biblical stories and ask if they are true is to ask whether or not you agree with the moral of the story or the archetype as a valid representation of reality, not whether or not God actually exists or whether or not the Bible makes sense scientifically or whether or not the events and people in it are actually historical.

In Genesis, to be naked and not ashamed is to lack self awareness that you have made yourself vulnerable and unprotected. Things were pretty good when we weren’t self-conscious and didn’t know we were naked. Clothing is a barrier of protection between you and the world. Knowing good and evil is to be aware of threat and to learn to be malevolent.

In Genesis, Adam and Eve are unconscious beings in a safe space and a serpent comes in to open their eyes and reveal suffering and death. Paradise comes to an end, they are expelled, and there are gates that keep them out. In the story of Buddha, he is raised in a protected city that only contains what is healthy and good and all things that cause suffering are kept from him. He is curious and wants to explore, just like Eve wonders why she can’t eat the fruit. They look beyond the confines of their safe space and look for trouble. You don’t want timid, sheltered, and coddled kids nor do we want antisocial kids breaking all the rules, we want a balance. We aren’t content with paradise or utopia because we are built to keep exploring the unknown and asking what’s next. We destroy paradise for challenge and adventure. Buddha encounters evil and suffering, becomes anxious, and spends months in PTSD. The world collapsed, he knew good and evil, and couldn’t return to paradise. You can’t return to childhood, so you go backwards by committing suicide—destroying your painful self-consciousness and making it all go away. What’s the way forward? Are you destroyed and that’s it? Or do you generate order out of chaos?

If these stories are archaic superstitions written by ignorant people in the past, why do they make so much sense?